Scheduling of single stage assembly with air transportation in a consumer electronic supply chain

Consumer electronics supply chain being a booming industry with intensive competition, multinational organizations are rapidly moving towards global manufacturing networks to minimize the costs and improve delivery efficiency. The studies on modeling and scheduling of global supply chains in consumer electronics industry have lead to growing interests in recent years. In this paper, the problem of synchronized scheduling of assembly with air transportation to minimize delivery costs is addressed. The overall problem is decomposed into sub-problems viz., the air transportation allocation problem and assembly scheduling problem. The air transportation allocation problem is shown to have the structure of the regular transportation problem, while the assembly scheduling problem is shown to be NP-hard. We investigate the case of process delays in assembly for reasons such as machine breakdowns, shortages of materials, etc., and present a schedule repair heuristic. We evaluate the performance of the proposed heuristic with industry practice methods by testing the heuristics on randomly generated problems of size varying from 20 to 100 jobs.